Literacy Blogs

Summer is almost upon us. The days are growing longer, the sun is higher in the sky, and soon school will be over for the year. Our children’s thoughts now turn to swimming, skateboards, baseball, and bike riding. Unfortunately, for far too many of kids, summer vacation is a time for forgetting. You’ve probably heard that “if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.” That’s certainly true about reading. Kids who don’t read over the summer regress. Their hard-earned reading skills decline. Boys and girls who manage to keep the rust off their reading, don’t suffer a summer reading drop.  By reading and writing throughout the summer, they may ...

Years ago, I was invited to coach some teachers. I’ve done a lot of that over the past almost 50 years. I watch a lesson, and the teacher and I sit down and discuss how it may be improved. But this was going to be a strange situation. The school had adopted a curriculum program I’d developed. They hadn’t told me that. Now I was to critique teachers who were using my lessons. Uncomfortable territory. The principal assured me it would be fine since the classes using my stuff were doing well—better test scores than in the past. I wasn’t so sure. Two teachers were using the program: one was ...

Blast from the Past: This entry first posted on April 28, 2018 and re-posted on November 23, 2019. I thought it a good idea to re-issue this posting now because of MIke Schmoker's recent column in Education Week (https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/11/20/how-to-make-reading-instruction-much-much.html). I know lots of educators love the idea of working with small groups in reading, but that is not always best practice (though under the right circumstances it can be useful). This blog explores the ins and outs (and ups and downs) of small group instruction in reading. Hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving). Teacher question: I was curious what your thoughts ...

Teacher question: I am a reading specialist and a parent. My daughter is in first grade. Her classroom teachers have all the books in the classroom library leveled, and students are not allowed to go beyond their reading level during "Independent" reading. If the teacher assesses a child inaccurately then that child is stuck reading texts that may be too easy or too challenging. Also, every child knows what reading level they are on as well as everyone else's reading level; this Talk creates competition and negative feelings toward reading! Reading turns into a contest and inevitably some kids are going to feel bad about themselves. What if a student ...

Teacher question: I wonder if you could comment on your blog about this crazy idea that the reading specialists should change the program every 12 weeks if a student is not showing growth on the one-minute reading fluency measure. I have second grade student who reads 80 wcpm with 97% accuracy. She made great growth in the fall but has leveled out this winter. She is being removed her from my “program” to Wilson because an outside evaluator said that is what she needs. What do you think? Shanahan response: One thing is clear: No matter how I answer this question, somebody is going to be mad at me. That’s okay ...

The last couple weeks I’ve clarified the definition of “independent reading” and explored the impact of kids doing required reading on their own at school. Independence is obviously a gradient; the independence teachers often refer to isn’t about whether kids must read or not (it is usually required in these schemes), but it is about who picks the texts and whether there is any accountability for the reading. By “independent reading,” these teachers really are talking about self-selection of the texts. Given the importance of literacy in our society it is essential that we teach students to read well. With regard to the learning impact of independent reading, the ...

Last week I explained the concept of “independent reading.” Reviewing various documents from across the past 150 years—research studies, government reports, encyclopedia entries, pronouncements of august organizations, teacher blogs, methods guides--revealed that we educators have been pretty sloppy in our use of that term. Of course, if everybody says independent reading, but no one means the same thing, there is a communications problem. I proposed reserving the term independent reading for situations that are truly independent: in which readers choose to read, choose what they want to read, and are accountable to no one for what they read. I said that I’d use “required self-selected reading” for those instances when teachers ...

Recently I posted a tweet challenging the idea that “independent reading” in the classroom was such a good idea. Not surprisingly I found myself the target of all kinds of Trumpian tweets and vilification. It got so bad that multiple major proponents of encouraging reading contacted me in embarrassment over the responses (because some of it was unprofessional, and much of it was just badly reasoned). Part of the problem is that many teachers believe their actions are deeply moral so if anyone questions their choices, they go off the deep end (there are few small disagreements about reading instruction these days). But honestly a really big part of the ...